Quotes About Executives

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.

When we asked 828 CEOs and senior executives from a variety of industries how much variation they expected to find in similar expert judgments, 10% was also the median answer and the most frequent one (the second most popular was 15%). A 10% difference would mean, for instance, that one of the two underwriters set a premium of $9,500 while the other quoted $10,500. Not a negligible difference, but one that an organization can be expected to tolerate.

America's treasure troves of public and private data, IP, and critical infrastructure continues to be pilfered, annihilated, and disrupted, while an organizational culture of 'Participation Trophy Winners" managed by tech neophyte executives continue to lose one battle after the next.

Exfiltrated metadata from internet service providers and social media platforms can be plugged into big data analytics and once the right algorithm is applied, can allow an adversary surgically precise psychographic targeting of critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. Why is no one talking about this?

For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.

I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits.

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.

The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they're the people that control this economy.

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible.

As the OLPC laptop was getting ready to go into mass production in 2007, many executives approached me wanting the screen that I invented, and the laptop architecture that I co-invented, for their new laptops, cell phones, and other devices.

During my whole year as Miss America and afterward, I was calling agents, looking for advice and opportunities. When I was in New York or in Los Angeles doing different appearances, if I had time on my schedule, I tried to meet with executives.

I look forward to partnering with campus executives, administrators, coaches and student-athletes to enhance the intercollegiate athletics experience.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa.

With a global society hungry for luxury, distribution and supply chains are now as important for executives as a hands-on feel for products.

I remember early in my career with Disney, which was a very strange time in the company - there were a couple of executives who were very supportive of me and kind of let me do my own thing.

Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.

Information supports intuition, and that's why we make our facts and figures available to everyone, from assembly line workers to senior executives. Businesses usually want such information to project numbers into the future, but precise facts and numbers are only helpful if they're used to enhance decision-making, not as the basis for it.

Even so, at times stress is inevitable, and seven-day-week-style activities, such as golf before a conference call, or a break on the beach between inventories, help reduce it to reasonable levels. Executives who are embarrassed to take these breaks or companies that frown on them are shortsighted. Stress is a major disruption; and its effects, such as burnout, are grim reapers for talented people.

Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives.

The executives had also sent the script to Steven Spielberg, whose fantasy films had made him the most commercially successful director in Hollywood. Everyone, including Spielberg, thought he was the wrong choice. However, Warner Bros. sent every script to "Steven" first.

The success of "Batman" gave the studio executives a feeling of invincibility. They asked themselves if the movie owed its success to Guber and Peters after all, or if it had really been the star, Jack Nicholson, who'd made it work, or Mark Canton, the chief production executive of Warner Bros.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.